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merelydev

181 karma · joined October 9, 2020

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merelydev··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
I volunteer my laptop, I suggest you and others do the same. We can hook them up in a VPN with E2ee. We just need 1 public IP. Lets Go!
merelydev··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
The beauty of supply and demand magic is that the market is now open for anyone that can provide server hosting cheaply.
merelydev··on How to earn a billion dollars
Clearly the system has vulnerabilities. Billionairs managed to exploit these. Asking whether this is good or bad is liking asking if hacking is good or bad for society. If vulnerabilities exist someone will exploit them, thats the arbitrage.

Instead of hating the hacker, we should ask can we have a system that is not vulnerable to"exploitation", which naturally leads to the old Capitalism vs Communism debate.

Capitalism is still the most decentralized system we have, if a worker is feeling exploited they can leave and work elsewhere but most importantly they have the option of starting their own business and utilize their skills. But capitalism's main vulnerability is that of investors that can buy up whole industries and collude and bring centralization.

Communism is inherently centralized, only works on a small scale like a village, on larger scale it requires strong leadership that can resist the temptations that come from centralized power, but strong leadership doesn't last forever.

merelydev··on Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC
That's a fair argument.
merelydev··on Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC
I agree, generally competition is a good thing, but in this case I think we're having a divide and conquer scenario that works in Google's advantage.

We're seeing that compute and investment liquidity is effectively a zero-sum game and by having Google go after the excess compute and liquidity (which they don't really need) will most likely weaken the competitors to the point where they aren't competitive. But if OpenAI and Anthropic merge they can pool resources and be more competitive.

merelydev··on Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC
In the last week Alphabet has positioned itself to go on the offense, going after exccess liquidity and excess compute.

I fear that OpenAi and Anthropic would not be able to compete against an adveserial Alphabet which owns it's own models, hardware, large corpus of data, talent and network effects. My prediction is that OpenAI and Anthropic will eventually be crushed by Alphabet as they run out of investment and compute, leaving Alphabet to have a monopoly on AI, at least in the west.

This is why I think OpenAI and Anthropic should really be one company, if they join forces and pool together investments and compute they'll stand a chance.

merelydev··on Changing how we develop Ladybird
Opensource doesn't mean open to contributions. The source code is available, you can fork it and apply your patches there.

This is the way to go to reduce supply chain vulnerabilities and to reduce time of mainters reviewing LLM slop.

merelydev··on Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute
That's 80B that doesn't go to OpenAI or Anthropic.
merelydev··on Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism
> Isn't that just an instance of the political problem for all ages: who controls what, who gets to rule and who obeys, the fundamental power struggle apparent in all human history.

Yes. But modern technology, especially software doesn't have the high barrier to entry like being a feudal lord, but successful software can be just as impactful, tie in economies of scale and network effects and it can be even more powerful, which has allowed the producers of such software to wield significant power and as a result bypass democracy. And this ties in with your point:

> The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?

It remains to be seen if this era of LLMs and datacenters raises or reduces the barrier to entry for software production and in general technological innovation. The marketplace is always hungry for innovation and those that can deliver and control it will be in a position of power.

merelydev··on Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism
Would you agree that to some extend, the ability to control technology is an incentive for companies to develop/innovate, and the more control they have the more profitable it is?
merelydev··on Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism
What does "democratic elections" even mean in this new world where traditional politicians don't understand these dynamics?
merelydev··on Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism
I believe the great problem of our age is deciding who controls technology.

The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role.

So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?

merelydev··on TempleOS WASM
> This is beyond resepectless and shameless to the bones. I don't care about that converted code, what i see is an embarresment.

I disagree, as a programmer having my code being used long after I am gone would be a great honor.

> The specific video is also picked for that reason: to let the deceased developer look bad and make fun of him.

I believe the linked video is Terry's last video that is why its so special.

There is a whole sub-culture, cult following lore around TempleOS, some of us used to watch the live-streams when Terry was coding in real time. Terry appreciated it and even when he was homeless, he tried very hard to reach his audience.

merelydev··on Hold on for Dear Life
I agree with you and the article. I was just pointing out though, that the main innovation in bitcoin is not the cryptography, but the game theory which goes far enough to allow adversaries to work together, follow the protocol/law. There are very few mechanisms that allow this type of adversarial coordination, another one is nuclear weapons which somewhat prevents war between nuclear states because of mutually assured destruction.

> Except when game theory does not account for externalities. As a follower of Doctorow myself, I have to point out that everyone is rent-seeking and that the forces that restrain it are abolished by systems like Bitcoin.

Yes most definitely. Decentralization is a spectrum. A village can be decentralized because everyone knows each other, and they trust each other to follow the protocol. But when you scale it up to a nation or global level where people don't know each other, you get people that don't want to follow the protocol for whatever reasons. Some attack the participants (wrench attacks) or some directly attack the protocol itself.

Usually the way to mitigate this is by adding a sub-system to filter/moderate out the bad actors. This sub-system than ends up with so much power it centralizes the system. Another way is by federation, which can decentralize the filtering. But the federations can also collude and centralize the network like the centralization of bitcoin miners, as you point out.

When someone is attacking the protocol this is the time when coordination is needed the most. Decentralized coordination on a large scale is hard, though bitcoin solved it for a very narrow use case (but not full proof since miners can collude and centralize).

So yea I agree with you, and with the article. Centralized governance might be a requirement for large scale coordination. But I cant help but see the beauty in in Satoshi's game theory, it being the key innovation in bitcoin and not the cryptography.

merelydev··on Hold on for Dear Life
As someone who is somewhat a long time disciple of Cory Doctorow, having read his book Little Brother, when I was 17, which introduced me to Linux, Privacy/Cryptography and the Surveillance State. I think he is really downplaying the core innovations of bitcoin, which are the incentives and game theory it uses to allow adversaries to play together.

For example in bitcoin if you have enough resources to spam the network, you are incentivized to mine instead, thereby securing the network and produce new blocks.

So I think game theory and aligned incentives can be used to address the law issues, allowing different entities whether its States, Corporations and individuals to work together, even if they absolutely hate each other.

Game theory takes over where cryptography ends. Bitcoin gives us a glimpse of this.

merelydev··on Are we self-sovereign PKI yet?
Yes, the UI/UX of decentralized systems is so difficult for users that it creates demand for centralized systems to manage it for them, Coinbase, Gmail, Github, Twitter, The Pirate Bay.
merelydev··on The Vatican-Anthropic relationship that's reshaping the AI ethics debate
Thank you, for the clarification.
merelydev··on The Vatican-Anthropic relationship that's reshaping the AI ethics debate
As it relates to religion, the West prays and the East meditates. Praying is to look outside of oneself, meditating is to look inside. This might explain the difference in source of truth.
merelydev··on Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
Generally Frontend is complex, Backend is simple. Both can be easy or hard depending on the project.
merelydev··on My Company Sold for $100M and I Got Zilch
You are probably using an adblocker. On Firefox you can open private browsing: ctrl+shift+p
merelydev··on Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub
I think it is Free as in Freedom.
merelydev··on Exotic Programming Ideas, Part 3: Effect Systems
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7wbtg/who_is_o...

   - Oleg eats lambdas for breakfast

   - The Y combinator fears Oleg

   - Oleg knows all the programs that halt on a Turing machine

   - Oleg is the guy that Chuck Norris goes to when he has an algorithm complexity question

   - Oleg reprograms his own DNA with Scheme macros

   - All of Oleg's Haskell programs are well-typed by definition

   - Oleg can read C++ compiler error messages.

   - Oleg built his house out of Prolog relations

   - Oleg speaks machine lanugage

   - Oleg once turned a zero into a one.

   - Emacs? Vi? Oleg wills files into existance

   - Oleg has the Haskell98 Report memorized. In Binary. In UTF-EBCDIC

   - Oleg can write unhygienic syntax-rules macros.

   - Sometimes Recursion gets confused when Oleg uses it.
merelydev··on Anarch: Super small public domain no-dependency from-scratch suckless Doom clone
Play it online here: https://drummyfish.gitlab.io/anarch/bin/web/anarch.html

To the creator thank you for making this. I also enjoyed reading the manifesto. Keep up the good work and never stop fighting capitalism.

merelydev··on The Vale Programming Language
The author posted this on reddit [0] a few months ago:

Vale's main goal is to be as fast as C++, but much easier and safer, without sacrificing aliasing freedom. It does this by using "constraint references", which behave differently depending on the compilation mode:

    Normal Mode, for development and testing, will halt the program when we try to free an object that any constraint ref is pointing at.

    Fast Mode compiles constraint refs to raw pointers for performance on par with C++. This will be very useful for games (where performance is top priority) or sandboxed targets such as WASM.

    Resilient Mode (in v0.2) will compile constraint refs to weak refs, and only halt when we dereference a dangling pointer (like a faster ASan). This will be useful for programs that want zero unsafety.
Vale v0.2 will almost completely eliminate Normal Mode and Resilient Mode's overhead with:

    Compile-time "region" borrow checking, where one place can borrow a region as mutable, or multiple places can borrow it as immutable for zero-cost safe references. It's like Rust but region-based, or Verona but with immutable borrowing.

    Pure functions, where a function opens a new region for itself and immutably borrows the region outside, making all references into outside memory zero-cost.

    "Bump calling", where a pure function's region uses a bump allocator instead of malloc/free.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/hplj2...
merelydev··on Notes for courses taken at Harvard (2015-2019)
[Warning Advice from a Beginner]

I started self learning Maths (number theory) this year from scratch I am extremely slow but I am progressing. My advice is take a textbook of the kind of maths you want to learn and skip the theory jump straight to the exercises do them and compare the answers, if your answers are wrong then read the theory. Also when doing exercises you can reference the theory but don't read the theory alone.

One thing that will block you is notation, if you are a coder Math As Code [0] is great way to decode the advanced Mathematical symbols, It helped me start reading math:

[0]- https://github.com/Jam3/math-as-code

merelydev··on Clean code won't save the planet
I think not using cloud computing and servers when not strictly necessary is more planet friendly. For example using decentralized p2p technologies like WebRTC is a good way to not use servers I know you still need servers for peer indexing etc but I argue that this is more green, we should start thinking in terms of offline first software where the user owns his data locally so it does not live on a server somewhere because the more data a server has the more compute power it will use to work with the data.

Edit: Typo

merelydev··on Octotree – Proprietary Firefox extension contains AGPL-licensed code
> I really hope Github's learning and (job) recommendation algorithms do not take this into account.

Github is becoming too powerful.

merelydev··on Per Brinch Hansen's books on compilers
Cool! Thank you for answering.
merelydev··on Per Brinch Hansen's books on compilers
Relevant to Systems Programming Languages today, or even modern operating systems. Sorry my English is bad but basically are these books about general principles that don't get outdated.
merelydev··on Per Brinch Hansen's books on compilers
Hi, these books look very interesting.Before I go ahead and try to read them I wanted to ask if they are still relevant today?
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